With Google Desktop and other (hyper)local search tools so popular now, shouldn’t restaurants, merchants and the like now be making liberally annotated vcards available for download on their sites? Interesting – a vcard with a resto’s menu in the notes field, with all of that data available to be searched when I next Google myself looking for “paella” (as I often do) or “calamari” (less often, but still, with brio). How odd that one of the first uses suggested for a “home computer” has amounted to almost nothing.
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Many merchants already publish their contact information, location etc. as part of the HTML of their websites. Even easier than publishing a vCard (which is invisible to users of the Web, and would simply unnecessarily duplicate most of that information), is to markup that existing HTML contact information with hCard, a 1:1 translation of vCard into HTML. The restaurant can then easily “publish” their vCard by simply linking to a converter that turns their contact page’s hCard into a vCard. Many folks have done this, and in fact, you can find a simple example of this at the bottom of my blog.